


petals and feathers

by spoke



Category: The Night Circus - Erin Morgenstern
Genre: F/F, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-03
Updated: 2016-02-03
Packaged: 2018-05-18 01:33:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5892973
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spoke/pseuds/spoke
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff"><p>I tend to picture Hinata and Tsukiko's competition as being martial in nature, more Last Airbender than stage magic.  I also don't think Hector bloody Bowen has ever understood that his students are always going to be more sensitive to the nature of the challenge, and that he's sending his students in with an inherent handicap in this thing. </p>
<p>It does make me wonder if there's ever been a match where the players hated each other though.</p></blockquote>





	petals and feathers

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bluemermaid](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluemermaid/gifts).



Perhaps ten years have passed in the game before Tsukiko finds out why Hinata is playing so slowly. She has had the terrible feeling before that her opponent could simply overwhelm her, but she shrugged it off as immaterial. 

If she wishes to lose, that is her own decision, after all. 

Until, in a moment of fire dancing with water, her dragons lunging after Tsukiko’s birds, they touch. It is breaking the rules, and when they are separated there will be consequences, but she’d seen something in Hinata’s eyes that she could not recall when questioned. For the first time since meeting him, Alexander’s opinion of the matter ...did not. What mattered was the rush of feeling, the sense of something joining that should never have been separate; what mattered was realizing Hinata was hers, and Tsukiko was Hinata’s, in a way that she suspected neither of their instructors understood. Love, or something more? 

What mattered was the fear she had sensed in Hinata, underneath the rush of joy. This whole time they had been moving closer, and closer. Their skills have improved, surely, but in terms of raw power Hinata is the stronger - of its nature, the way she has chosen requires it. The need to know what she has to fear drives Tsukiko to sneak out after Alexander has done lecturing her. She does not think for a moment that he believes her protestations of innocence, given that _he_ at least had noticed they were being drawn together; she cannot speak for Hinata’s teacher, having never seen him outside of the matches. She simply does not care at the moment what Alexander will think. 

When she finds her, Hinata is playing with fire, letting it wave from hand to hand and forming a flower in each, a different one every time. She watches, fascinated as always by the spontaneity of her methods, the seeming lack of planning. After the incident in this match, she keeps no illusion there is any such lack. 

She acknowledges that Tsukiko is watching with a simple change; the last flower folds in on itself and blossoms out into a bird that flies to the hand Tsukiko stretched out for it without thinking. Hinata lowers her eyes as the feathers curl into disappearing wisps of smoke, and Tsukiko knows it is because of the fear. 

Learning what it is will cause them both to draw out the game for as long as they can bear it.

**Author's Note:**

> I tend to picture Hinata and Tsukiko's competition as being martial in nature, more Last Airbender than stage magic. I also don't think Hector bloody Bowen has ever understood that his students are always going to be more sensitive to the nature of the challenge, and that he's sending his students in with an inherent handicap in this thing. 
> 
> It does make me wonder if there's ever been a match where the players hated each other though.


End file.
